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Reevely: Regional planning or UN plot? Depends who you ask

Author of the article:

David Reevely

Publishing date:

September 18, 2014 • 3 minute read

Tory Jack MacLaren has said he's "proud" of his fellow MP, Cheryl Gallant, for having the courage to talk about the UN's Agenda 21. It's one of the reasons why a regional plan for Ontario would be a bad idea, they say.Jana Chytilova/ Ottawa Citizen

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“In a nutshell, the plan calls for government to eventually take control of all land use removing decision making from the hands of private property owners,” Gallant wrote. “It is assumed people are not good stewards of their land and ‘the government’ will do a better job if it is in total control. Individual rights in general are to give way to the needs of communities as determined by the governing body.”

The mechanism, she wrote, is legislation like Ontario’s Places to Grow Act, a 2005 law that promotes regional-scale planning to make sure different municipalities’ goals don’t conflict.

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“People will have to move from private homes and into single dwellings like apartments, as homeownership will become largely unaffordable the way it is in many urban areas like Toronto today,” Gallant wrote. “More extreme measures like a federal liberal carbon tax will force people out of private cars and onto public transit that only exists in cities. U.N. Agenda 21 proponents cite the affluence of North Americans as being a major problem which needs to be corrected.”

Jack MacLaren, the Progressive Conservative who represents neighbouring Carleton-Mississippi Mills, promoted the essay in a tweet this week. “I’m proud of (Gallant) for having the courage to bring up the issue of Agenda 21,” he wrote.

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The City of Ottawa wants a long-term vision for this part of the province. Its policy of encouraging people to live downtown so we won’t have to pay for ever-longer, ever-wider roads, for instance, isn’t much use if Arnprior and Rockland happily approve exurban subdivisions, and drivers who don’t pay Ottawa taxes crowd in anyway.

City council voted to ask the province for a long-term regional plan a couple of months ago.

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The name of the thing makes it sound a lot shadowier than it is. The “21” part is for the 21st century; there are no Agendas 1 through 20. It arose from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, an event that was a really big deal at the time, and concluded with a general agreement that rich countries couldn’t keep consuming stuff at the rate we were or else the planet would run out sooner than we’d like.

More importantly, if poor countries started using coal and water and oil at the rate the rich countries were, we’d all really be screwed. So everybody signed on to this well-intended but toothless agreement that rich countries should try to waste less and help poor countries get richer without following the same path we did. It did not commit anybody to anything in particular. Agenda 21 was the UN at its most UN-ish: a lot of big talk and that was pretty much it.

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Gallant’s essay outlines her views thoroughly. I called MacLaren’s office to learn more about his thoughts Wednesday. His spokesman, Brad McNulty, said MacLaren was on his way back to Ottawa from New Brunswick but he’d be in touch Thursday. He wasn’t. McNulty (who’s also been president of MacLaren’s Tory riding association) mentioned that Gallant is brave to challenge Agenda 21 “because nobody else is doing it.”

If you don’t believe the premise that the earth has finite resources and we’re using them up — if you believe the ostensible reason for having held an Earth Summit 22 years ago wasn’t just wrong, but a lie — it is true that Agenda 21 only makes sense as a crypto-communist manifesto. In which case anything pro-environment, pro-urban, or anti-poverty, anything that could be in alignment with any of the broad themes in Agenda 21, isn’t what it appears to be: It’s actually a sinister plot.

Even if it’s something as simple as making sure different cities and towns plan their futures together, rather than fighting over them.

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